As he showed during his Arkansas days, Huckabee is at his best when running against elites — be they the "country clubbers" within his own party or the Democratic "political machine" that he argued continually thwarted his reformist policies in Arkansas. As Huckabee put it in his classic us versus them style, "I'm not popular among the Little Rock elite, but out there in real Arkansas, people like honesty." From his triple-wide on the Mansion grounds to his grandstanding on "covenant" marriages, Huckabee continually showed himself to be a master of the theatrics and the rhetoric of conservative populism.